In recent years, the global position system (GPS) has been widely adopted to assist motorists to navigate the road when driving to a destination. Many automobile manufacturers offer GPS navigation devices built in to the dash-board of the automobiles. In addition, there are portable GPS navigation devices that perform functions to those of the built-in GPS devices in the automobiles, and the users can transfer them to be used in different cars. This type of GPS navigation device identifies the locations of the motorists on a highway via satellites and provides navigational instructions to the motorists while they are driving. There is another type of portable GPS navigation device that is used by hikers to identify their locations in the mountains. However, these types of GPS devices do not work when the users are inside buildings, such as a shopping mall, or in large open spaces such as an amusement park where geographic information may not exist. Moreover, the current GPS navigation devices do not support communications among multiple users regarding their respective locations.
In circumstances when a group of users need to find each other in a large building or in an amusement park, they use their cellular phones to call each other back and forth, communicating information such as where their locations are, what their surroundings look like, and how to find each other. Such phone calls back and forth are inefficient and time-consuming.
Another conventional solution to this problem is to use the short message service (SMS) technology whereby each user can send a short text message to the group informing them of her location. This is an improvement over the cellular phone method as the text message is broadcasted to all members of the group (one-to-many communication) as opposed to two people talking on their respective cellular phones (point-to-point communication). However, this group of users communicates with each other without a clear idea of the location of the other members. They rely on each other's text description of their respective locations, which may be hard to describe or may take a long time to type into a mobile device. In some cases, some people are not comfortable in describing navigational or directional (north, east, south, west) instructions, which typically lead to wrong directions and a waste of time.
Therefore, there is a need for a method and system to keep track of the locations of members in a user-defined group. There is a need for a method and system for communicating with multiple users via a map over the Internet.